Kicked out of school for being pregnant: forced tests violating girls’ rights in east Africa

Angella Auma was 14 when she was called into the staff room at her school in Busia, eastern Uganda, and asked why her stomach was curving. A teacher began to press her abdomen. Before she understood what was happening, she had been told to go home and not come back. Angella hadn’t known she was pregnant – but by the end of the day, her whole class knew.

Angella’s story is part of a pattern that exists across the continent and has done for generations. Coercive pregnancy testing that results in girls being expelled from school is humiliating, invasive and potentially unlawful. But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) can reveal that schools in some African countries are continuing the practice in breach of national guidelines or legal judgments.

“Teachers examine girls, [touching them] around their bodies,” explained David Mwanga, a legal worker who supported Angella. “They look at the changes of their body, the changes in the breast size.” Sometimes testing is performed using the same kits found in pharmacies around the world, but often it’s done via the sort of hands-on process Angella was subjected to.

In recent years, West Africa’s highest court and a pan-African human rights body have ruled the expulsion of pregnant girls to be in violation of legally binding African charters on children’s rights, including to education, privacy and freedom from discrimination. Forced pregnancy testing has also been found to breach human rights.

In Uganda, a government guideline was issued at the end of 2020, allowing pregnant girls and adolescent mothers to continue their education – a noted break from previous practices. But even with rules in place protecting pregnant students, TBIJ has found that girls are still at risk of coercive testing and exclusion.

TBIJ has examined six other cases since the start of 2021 that appear to have breached the guideline – but the true figures are likely to be far higher. The cases were recorded by the legal charity Mwanga works for, Women With a Mission (WWM), which serves just nine of 146 districts in Uganda. Families are often wary of engaging with these services for fear of reproach from their community, so these instances are probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Angella was made pregnant, she says, by an older man. (He is now awaiting trial, according to her legal team.) The ordeal was distressing enough before her teachers compounded the damage. “I was stigmatised by the administration of the school,” said Angella via a translator in her local language of Lusamia. Even though it was the school that was in the wrong, she said, “they kept on talking wrong about me within the community”. Her parents have consented to her being identified in this story.

The school did not respond to TBIJ’s request for comment. It had initially denied examining and expelling Angella but after WWM applied to the high court detailing her experience, it agreed to readmit her.

For Angella, though, the prospect of being shunned by teachers and pupils was too much. She has not gone back.

‘Like a rotten tomato’

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of adolescent pregnancies of any region in the world, according to UN data. And in some parts of Uganda, teenage pregnancies rose by as much as 49% after the Covid pandemic, when the country’s schools were shut for longer than in virtually any other nation. These figures shocked the government into action.

Despite opposition from religious leaders, a guideline was issued in December 2020 saying that pregnant girls and adolescent mothers should be allowed to continue their education – after a year’s enforced maternity leave – and to sit their national exams.

But government directives have come up against deeply-rooted beliefs, explained Mwanga. “[People think] these girls were going to be a bad example to others. They were going to influence others to do the same thing,” he said.

“If these girls are to remain in school, it will be like a tomato which is rotten that remains in the basket of new tomatoes and then makes them all rotten.”

If Angella had kept quiet about her experience at school, Mwanga said, “no one would have known”. But she decided to speak out – and told her father what she’d been through. After hearing about WWM on the radio, he approached the charity for advice and together they were able to mount a legal challenge against the actions of her school.

In September 2024, a high court judge in Tororo, eastern Uganda, handed down a consent order (an agreement between two parties supervised by a judge). The school agreed Angella should be allowed to continue her education.

While the agreement is specific to Angella’s case, it sets a precedent and has already sparked a national conversation in Kampala’s corridors of power. But it hasn’t put a stop to school exclusions. WWM has worked on the cases of five other girls expelled due to pregnancy since the ruling in September. All were readmitted after WWM’s challenge. But the charity has heard of other exclusions outside its remit.

Though Uganda’s new guideline is a seemingly progressive move, it actually formalises the invasive testing policy, stating that “all girls should be examined for pregnancy periodically, at least once termly”.

What’s more, it has been condemned as discriminatory by the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER), a Ugandan NGO, because it enforces a year of mandatory maternity leave once the girls are around three months pregnant. “In effect, the guidelines do not permit pregnant girls to be in school,” said ISER.

WWM said in the future it would like to challenge these parts of the guideline.

Rosette Nanyanzi, a gender adviser at the Ugandan Ministry of Education, told TBIJ both pregnancy testing and the period of leave were there to protect girls. A school routine that includes sitting on hard wooden benches for 12 hours a day is “not safe and conducive”, she said, and pregnancy testing makes sure they access the “proper services”.

But she also acknowledged the decision to begin the leave at the three-month mark was motivated in part by “morals” – the idea that visibly pregnant girls are a bad influence on their peers.

The ministry did not respond to TBIJ’s further questions.

Meaningful change?

In Tanzania the practices are even harsher – and once again, marks of apparent progress do not tell the whole story.

Until late 2021, there was an outright ban on pregnant girls attending school at all. Rights organisations filed a complaint to the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) in 2019 to challenge the government, claiming that girls as young as 11 were being subjected to painful, non-consensual pregnancy testing in almost all public schools. It said those found pregnant – even in cases of sexual abuse or incest – were almost always expelled.

They won their case. But TBIJ has seen documents revealing that no laws have yet been introduced to prevent forced testing or expulsion.

Instead the government is currently relying on a 2021 notice from the Ministry of Education that says, among other things, that students who have dropped out due to pregnancy should be allowed to return to school within two years. However, the notice is not legally enforceable.

The government has issued figures suggesting more than 10,000 pupils who dropped out for a variety of reasons have returned to school as a result – though the two year cut-off excluded the girls at the heart of the original case, according to one lawyer involved.

The notice also forms part of the agreement for a $500m loan granted to Tanzania from the World Bank, to fund secondary education, which includes the condition that girls in the country must be allowed to resume their studies after pregnancy. The money was paid on account of the government issuing the notice, as well as a separate guideline forbidding non-consensual pregnancy testing.

But it is uncertain how much has truly changed for many girls in Tanzania. Getrude Dyabene of the Legal and Human Rights Centre, which helped bring the ACERWC case, said schools are often not aware of the changes. She said that visits by her organisation have revealed that forced testing is still happening – and expulsions routinely follow.

“The practice is still ongoing,” she said. “The government said they have directed schools not to conduct pregnancy testing for girls. And we are like, ‘Okay, where is that directive? Is there a letter?’”

The World Bank told TBIJ it monitored closely for instances where pregnant girls or young mothers were prevented from continuing their education.

“When we are made aware of situations like this, we follow up with the authorities to take remedial action,” a spokesperson said. “This includes reinforcing the guidelines with school staff and providing further training.”

Tanzania’s ministries for health and education did not respond to questions about what actions they are taking to implement the ruling.

‘The teachers shamed her’

It’s more than a year since Angella was expelled and her baby girl, whose names translates to “peace”, is nine months old. On an oppressively hot day on the eastern border of Uganda, she talks about the hairdressing course that she enrolled on when she felt unable to return to school.

She says she’s enjoying it – happy to have friends in a similar position to her and to be able to provide for her daughter. But she says she would have loved to have had a full education, “like any other [person]”, before considering a vocational college.

“What the teachers did, it was torturing her,” said her father, David Wafula. “And even shaming her in front of her friends at school.”

A keen artist, she had dreamed of making wedding dresses. “My desire and passion was always to be a designer,” she said. For now, that dream has been put on hold.